Directed by Gaylen Ross, the documentary Killing Kasztner was eight years in the making. Dr. Israel Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew, was one of the leaders of a small Zionist rescue organization in Budapest. Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to allow 1700 Jews to leave Hungary by train in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds. What is unknown is what, if anything, else Kasztner had to promise or deliver to assure the heart-stopping rescue. The "Kasztner Train," as it was called, was held hostage for a time in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, eventually arriving to safety in Switzerland. After Kasztner moved to Israel, he was accused of being a collaborator and fought a vicious libel battle in a trial that condemned him as "the man who sold his soul to the Devil." Though the verdict against Kasztner was overturned in a 4 to 1 decision by the Supreme Court, he didn't live to see it. He was gunned down at his Tel Aviv doorstep a year earlier by right wing Jewish extremist Ze'ev Eckstein in Tel Aviv in 1957. In the more sensational aspect of the film, after 50 years the assassin breaks his silence about the fateful night he pulled the trigger, killing Kasztner. Eckstein reveals step by step his transformation into an assassin -- the events and passions that turned a young man into an agent of politics and revenge.

Over the past five decades theater and film have sought to reexamine Kasztner's legacy, but he has remained in that indefinable realm of the "Grey Zone." His was an incomprehensible heroism to his new homeland. Israel was making heroes of those who fought and resisted. Not those who sat down with one's enemies. Even now Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated on the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the fighters upon whom the country based their vision of bravery.

Two years ago Yad Vashem received Kasztner's archives. While the ceremony raised the bar of acceptance, Kasztner remained stigmatized by half a century of rumor and defamation.

" Especially to the world outside of Israel, Kasztner, except among those he saved, or whose families he didn't save, is perhaps the last great untold story of the Holocaust," said director Gaylen Ross.

As the film about a man who bargained for lives opened to overflowing crowds in Israeli cinemas during the Gaza War, the discussions were often fierce, as they often are in Israel, and painful. Debates continued well past midnight until theaters were forced turn off their lights to clear the lobbies. One man stood up at the end of the film weeping about his own grandson who had died in the earlier Lebanon conflict, and the choice of sacrificing lives instead of talking with one's enemies.

And other voices silenced for half a century were now speaking out. Since the premiere of Killing Kasztner, survivors who were too intimidated to testify on his behalf during the trial were stepping forward to do so. From the front page of Israel's Haaretz, December 12, 2008, " … More than 50 years after the murder of Israel (Rudolf) Kastner, the de facto head of the Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest, the controversy surrounding him is being rekindled. Now a storm has been raised again after the documentary "Killing Kastner" by the American director Gaylen Ross …" Baruch Tzahor, 83 years old, was then forbidden to testify by his political party leader. "He said the community needs heroes, not people who collaborated with the Germans," says Tzahor.